The SEO News Round Up: More Twitter Updates, The End of Infographics According To Cutts, Google’s Domination and ROCKZi

Anyone in search will know that being proactive rather than reactive saves a hell of a lot of time, so, rather than trawling through endless RSS feeds and Google Alerts in an attempt to stay ahead, why not go grab a coffee and spend ten minutes on Fresh Egg’s SEO Round Up?

This week’s highlights are Twitter making a few neat changes which could help you with outreach, Matt Cutts deciding infographics aren’t so fun after all and Blekko becoming a socialite.

Twitter updates

Thankfully some good news from Twitter HQ this week: after a difficult month with some notable blackouts, the Fail Whale has spurted out a few pretty useful updates.

Filter Tweet results from people you know – You can now also see Tweets from ‘People you follow’ rather than just ‘Everyone’ or ‘Top Tweets’

Spelling corrections for misspelled terms - For those who need a little help

Related suggestions – Twitter’s version of Google suggests

Real names and usernames in search results — If you search for a person’s real name in Twitter (e.g. Matt Cutts) you’ll now see results mentioning that person’s name and their Twitter username (e.g. @mattcutts)

Well done, Twitter: you’ve just made outreach and engagement that little bit easier for us all.

Matt Cutts doesn’t like infographics

You just can’t keep this guy out of the headlines. In an interview this week with Eric Enge (The Art Of SEO co-author, Stone Temple Consulting founder), Mr Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts discussed the potential of Google discounting the value of links generated via the medium of infographics.

When asked about the use of infographics as a promotional tool, Matt Cutts told Eric:

“In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of an infographic. What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it’s based on is simply wrong, then it’s misleading people.”

And:

“I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.”

It would appear that Matt isn’t a fan of infographics. In all fairness, he has a point. I’m sure a number of us have come across infographics that would make Mr Cutts break down in tears, but what’s concerning is his generalisation of infographics as a whole. Of all the infographics ever produced, I’m certain he would have only been exposed to less than 0.5% of them. Of those that he has seen, how many are likely to be high quality, considering his day job?

It seems Cutts wants to shut down the visual representation of data party, so if you’re working on an infographic project in the next few weeks please make sure your embedded link sits neatly at the top of the page, in bold and underlined.

July Mozscape update

The guys over at SEOmoz have been working hard to finally bring us some fresh data from it’s Mozscape index. In a blog post from SEOMoz on July 6th, Rand informed us that this index is much smaller than previous indices, down to 78 billion URLs from the 165 billion processed in May.

They’ve had some problems with the reliability of Amazon’s AWS system and issues keeping such large data sets fresh, which has resulted in this smaller index. SEOMoz are subsequently looking to build a new private hybrid cloud data centre for Mozscape and grow the index size back up to 100 billion+ URLs.

The update to this data means that you are likely to see some changes to your MozRank, MozTrust and Domain Authority scores.

Google and Bing reach all time high market shares

Google: 66.8% in June, up from 66.7% in May, an all-time high for Google

Bing: 15.6% in June, up from 15.4% in May, an all-time high for Bing

Yahoo: 13% in June, down from 13.4% in May, an all-time low for Yahoo

Yahoo has now suffered ten consecutive declining months, losing 3.3% of the market in this period. Bing, however, has continued its impressive ongoing performance, now having had 26 months of either flat or rising market share.

Blekko launches social platform ROCKZi

A search engine launching a social platform; I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere. This week, Blekko launched ‘ROCKZi’, which bears the tagline: “Read. Vote. Rock.”

Users are invited to share their articles or news stories via 33 categories or ‘boards’. Users are rewarded for voting up or adding articles and in return get karma points. Karma points equal increased authority on the ROCKZi platform. Think of it as Pinterest for news.

“ROCKZi’s great content, its state of the art design, and its very intuitive, low touch set of tools, creates a social platform that brings curation to the masses,” says Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta.

Crucially, Blekko have also said that they plan on using ROCKZi social signals in conjunction with the Blekko search engine to help identify high quality content and push spam to the bottom of their SERPs.